BEIRUT/UNITED NATIONS, Feb 5 (Reuters) – Western and Arab states voiced outrage on Sunday after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have backed an Arab plan urging Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to give up power, and Washington vowed harsher sanctions against Damascus.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the veto a “travesty”. It came a day after activists say Syrian forces bombarded a district of Homs, killing more than 200 people in the worst night of bloodshed of the 11-month uprising.

Russia said the resolution was biased and would have meant taking sides in a civil war. Syria is Moscow’s only big ally in the Middle East, home to a Russian naval base and customer for its arms. China’s veto appeared to follow Russia’s lead.

Washington’s U.N. ambassador Susan Rice said she was “disgusted” by Russia and China’s vetoes on Saturday, and “any further bloodshed that flows will be on their hands”.

In Syria, Barack Obama has simply failed. His cabinent-level United Nations ambassador has failed. It’s past time for people to get fired according to a man who served four UN ambassadors over eight years:

One of the reasons the American public holds unelected government officials in such low esteem is that they are never held accountable for their failures.

Presidents and cabinet officials could send a strong message of accountability if they held senior appointees responsible for their performance.

President Obama should use this weekend’s UN failure to show Americans and Arabs alike that it is unacceptable to stand idly by while some 6,500 Syrians are killed by their government. Obama should ask for U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice’s resignation and replace her with someone tougher and more effective. If she won’t voluntarily resign then she should be fired.

The case against Susan Rice has been building over the last few years.

This weekend’s embarrassing failure on a Syria resolution was the latest and last straw. Her diplomatic failures and silence have given the United States a weak representation at the United Nations.

Next month marks the anniversary of the Syrian uprising. But Rice, as she has on many issues, has ignored Syria’s growing problems for too long.

Rather than speaking out immediately when the violence started, she stayed silent.

Rather than calling for action, she did nothing.

Russia and China saw Rice’s passivity as a sign that Syrian President Assad’s removal wasn’t a priority.

By the time Rice started pressuring Security Council members to confront the growing violence and death, it was too late.

Once a draft resolution condemning Syria was introduced, Rice was too quick to negotiate changes that weakened it without insisting on a date for the Security Council to vote. Her constant agreement to changes seemed desperate. The frantic and late maneuvering left the United States at the mercy of Russia and China, who vetoed even the watered down measure.

On her post-veto media tour, however, Rice sought to blame Russia for not listening to the United States or other western governments rather than acknowledge her failed diplomatic skills – an ironic spin given that Rice and team Obama created this same new Russian resolve when they naively and dramatically called for a “re-set” to our relationship with Russia.

The “reset” Rice championed and spoke affectionately about has not only failed to deliver support for US national security policies but it has also exposed the dangers of an inexperienced team’s strategy of personal diplomacy.

This continues Rice’s pattern of failing at her own stated goals.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Susan Rice talked very openly about restoring America’s leadership at the United Nations and often derided President George W. Bush for acting without U.N. backing.

She was very critical of the US’s reputation at the UN and vowed to build better relationships with every country.

In her current stump speech Rice claims that her goal has been accomplished, “We’ve repaired frayed relations with countries around the world. We’ve ended needless American isolation on a wide range of issues. And as a consequence, we’ve gotten strong cooperation on things that matter most to our national security interest.”

This past weekend shows just how disastrous Rice’s strategy has been.

Rice has been silent on important issues and ineffective when she does engage. She skipped Security Council meetings when Israel needed defending and even failed to show up for the emergency session on the Gaza Flotilla incident.

Rice didn’t even show up for the first two emergency Security Council meetings on the unfolding Arab revolution last year.

Rice stayed silent when Iran was elected to the UN women’s committee, she didn’t call out Libya when it was elected to the Human Rights Council, she was absent from the Haiti crisis meeting and was a no-show for the last open meeting scheduled before the planned U.N. vote to recognize Palestinian statehood. When she actually shows up, she is a miserable failure.

Take the crucial issue of Iran. Rice spent the last several years undermining and grumbling about the Bush administration’s increasingly tough measures but has only been able to pass one resolution of her own – compared with the Bush team’s five.

Rice’s one and only Iran resolution was 22 months ago. And it passed with just 12 votes of support – the least support we have ever seen for a Security Council sanctions resolution on Iran. In fact, Susan Rice lost more support with her one resolution than the previous five Iran resolutions combined.

In another example, Rice secretly negotiated with the Arabs on acceptable language for a possible U.N. resolution to condemn Israel’s settlement activity.

Rice’s engagement sent a strong message that making a new policy, rather than encouraging the two sides to negotiate directly, may not garner an automatic U.S. veto.

In February of 2011, the US abruptly changed tactics on the Arabs and vetoed a UN resolution on Israeli settlements.

The Palestinians were justifiably furious with Rice. After all, they had just spent weeks going back and forth with her on acceptable language to make Israeli settlement activity a violation of international law — something previous U.S. administrations had bluntly and immediately threatened a veto over. Rice’s negotiations suggested the U.S. was open to change, when in fact it was not.

Whether the issue is Sudan, Egypt, North Korea or Rwanda, Rice has been either missing in action or unable to deliver a quick and effective resolution.

Firing Rice may serve Secretary of State Hillary Clinton too. Clinton’s team has always viewed Susan Rice with suspicion dating back to the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, when Rice went on MSNBC to slam Clinton’s ad claiming she was best equipped to take the national security emergency call at 3 a.m.

“Clinton hasn’t had to answer the phone at three o’clock in the morning and yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready. They’re both not ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call,” Rice said. Secretary Clinton, one State Department diplomat told me, has tried to distance herself from Rice and her lackluster UN performance.

President Obama could show the Arab street that it is unacceptable for the United States government to sit idly by while the United Nations Security Council does nothing. What better way to show that things at the U.N. have to change than to fire the woman spearheading the failed U.S. efforts there.

Rice’s last diplomatic initiative should be putting the United States’ reputation above her own.

Richard Grenell served as the spokesman for four US Ambassadors to the United Nations. including John Negroponte, John Danforth, John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad. He is currently based in Los Angeles. For more visit his website at www.richardgrenell.com.

For the “disgusted” and “outraged” liberals who are so shocked that Russia and China would block such an effort, let me just say one thing as politely as I know how:

YOU QUIVERING, HYPOCRITE, ABJECT PILES OF FOUL-SMELLING TOXIC SLIME!!! HAVE THE DECENCY TO THINK BACK TO 2003 WHEN RUSSIA AND CHINA (ALONG WITH YOUR BUDDIES IN FRANCE) DID THE SAME EXACT THING WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH WAS JUST TRYING TO GET REASONABLE WMD INSPECTIONS!!! YOU ACTUALLY JOINED RUSSIA AND CHINA LIKE THE TRAITORS YOU ARE. AND YOU GAVE BUSH NO CHOICE WHATSOEVER BUT TO GO TO WAR WITH IRAQ!!!

I tried to write a history of what Democrats did in joining Russia and China as a means to undermine Bush:

If Democrats had just been united with the rest of the nation, we could have presented a strong, united front to the world. As it was, Saddam Hussein did not believe America would invade because Democrats had so fractured America, and Russia, China and France saw no reason to cooperate with the President of the United States when no DEMOCRATS in his own country would lift a finger to do anything other than stab him in the back.

In the end, it was basically the United States and its historic ally England standing against Iraq, Russia, China, France, the United Nations and the Democrat Party.

So now Russia and China are doing the same thing they did to George Bush for year after year and suddenly only NOW it’s “disgusting” and “outrageous”???

It obviously IS “disgusting” and “outrageous” what Syria is doing. They have killed thousands of their own people.

Since 2003 in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of bodies have been discovered in more than 300 mass graves. The Ministry of Human Rights estimates that as many as 1,500,000 people remain missing and unidentified. The missing may have been captured, abducted, secretly detained or killed and buried en masse in unmarked graves. Iraqi Minister of Human Rights Mohammed S. Al-Sudaney stated “It is important for the future of Iraq that we engage in a sustainable effort to address this issue. Millions of Iraqis have been affected by decades of abuse and we must work on their behalf to find their missing relatives.”

You Democrats are on an eternal walk of shame.

As vile as Russia and China are for their veto of any resolution to help the people of Syria, it is no more than what the vile current president of the United States deserves.

And never forget that the Democrat Party stood for the rape, torture and murder of untold hundreds of thousands of the Iraqi people. Even as they falsely postured themselves as championing human values.

You need to understand the STAKES of what is going on in Syria as Russians and Chinese (along with Syrian thugs) sense weakness in a truly weak President Obama:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As the Obama administration weighs worst-case scenarios for Syria, one stands out: a civil war that develops into a proxy battle between Arabs and the West on one side, and Russia and Iran on the other.

U.S. officials stress they do not want to play a military role in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on protests has killed more than 5,000 people and raised fears of a protracted power struggle in a country at the heart of the Arab world.

But after U.S. and Arab-led efforts to craft consensus in the U.N. Security Council on Syria’s political transition were torpedoed by vetoes from Russia and China, some analysts say risks are growing that the international community will line up on opposite sides of a fratricidal war.

The volatile ingredients are already in place.

Resistance fighters known as the Free Syrian Army have pledged to liberate the country from Assad’s rule. Activists call for armed support for rebels. And Syrian security forces are ratcheting up the violence, vowing to fulfil their president’s threat to strike with an “iron fist” against the government’s opponents.

“”There is a risk of it could become a proxy conflict. It is already headed in that direction,” said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Mr. Obama downplayed concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood could take power and install a government hostile to U.S. interests.

“I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt but they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti U.S., there is no doubt about it,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama said he wanted a representative government in Egypt that reflected the country’s broader civil society.

Though the current upheavals in the Middle East were not initiated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist parties in Egypt, as in Tunisia and Libya, have been the chief beneficiaries of the collapse of long-standing authoritarian repressive regimes across North Africa.

In Egypt itself, the two largest Islamist groups, the Brotherhood and the Salafists, won about three-quarters of the ballots in the second round of legislative elections held in December 2011, while the secular and the liberal forces took a battering.

The Brotherhood, an organization founded by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan el Banna back in 1928, has never deviated from its founder’s central axiom:

“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

It is this radical vision, which animates all those in the region who seek a fully Islamic society and way of life.

The Muslim Brotherhood has always been deeply anti-Western, viscerally hostile to Israel and openly anti-Semitic — points usually downplayed in Western commentary on the “Arab Spring.”

CAIRO — Ignoring a U.S. threat to cut off aid, Egypt on Sunday referred 19 Americans and 24 other employees of nonprofit groups to trial before a criminal court on accusations they illegally used foreign funds to foment unrest in the country.

Egypt’s military rulers had already deeply strained ties with Washington after their crackdown on U.S.-funded groups promoting democracy and human rights that the country’s leadership has accused of stirring up violence in the aftermath of the uprising a year ago that ousted Hosni Mubarak. The decision to send 43 workers from the groups to stand trial marks a sharp escalation in the dispute.

The 19 Americans include Sam LaHood, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s son and the head of the Egypt office of the Washington-based International Republican Institute.

“Threatening to cut off aid”??? What the hell business do we have giving the MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AID?!?!?

But, yes, Obama was actually trying to INCREASE AID TO THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD-DOMINATED EGYPT JUST A FEW SHORT WEEKS AGO:

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama plans to accelerate the pace of American aid to Egypt, a top State Department official said on Wednesday, as the most populous Arab nation reaches a critical stage in its uncertain transition away from autocratic rule.

Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats, part of a U.S. delegation that held unprecedented talks last week with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, said Washington wanted to provide “more immediate benefits” to Egyptians, who earlier this month conducted their first democratic elections in decades.

“During this period, we want to be as supportive as we can. This is an historic moment. Egypt’s a country of enormous importance,” Hormats said.

Hosni Mubarak was a dictator and a thug, but he was the best America and Israel were ever going to get in a region of evil nutjobs. Now what do we have thanks to Obama???

If you haven’t already seen the magnitude of this president’s utterly contemptible and despicable failure, you are without excuse if you don’t understand it now.

As for Iran and the nuclear weapons that Obama will allow them to have, and the war Obama’s failure to that regard will create, I just wrote a piece about that. Suffice it to say that George Bush TRIED to do something about Iran’s dangerous nuclear weapons program, but demonic Democrats including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton prevented him from being able to do anything.

Democrats were completely wrong; Bush was 100 percent RIGHT.

Every single Democrat who voted for Obama deserves to have an Iranian nuclear bomb shoved right up their anuses and detonated, but unfortunately they are going to take the rest of the world with them.

Remember Libya and Obama’s overthrow of Gaddafi? And how Obama took all the credit in the world for that?

The political situation in Libya is falling apart:

I was pointing out that Obama had taken us from bad to far, far worse as far back as August of last year. So it’s not like Obama couldn’t have known what would probably happen.

Obama has Samantha Powers (the wife of Cass Sunstein, the man who “nudges us”) close to him and advising him on matters of war. According to the very liberal publication The Nation, “She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” What if you had an ultra conservative – oh, say a Sarah Palin – openly acknowledged to pursue war and risk American lives to advance her radical values??? What would the left call this if not “fascist”?

I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

Aside from the fact that it is naked chutzpah that the same two men who demonized George Bush for his successful surge strategy and tried to do everything they could to undermine and backstab Bush during his efforts to prevail in Iraq, it at least serves to prove that Iraq was a huge success for Bush as Obama took office.

Listen to the general who directed that surge speaking of Obama’s disastrous and disgraceful failure in Iraq:

President Obama’s decision to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq by Dec. 31 is an “absolute disaster” that puts the burgeoning Arab democracy at risk of an Iranian “strangling,” said an architect of the 2007 troop surge that turned around a losing war.

Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane was at the forefront of persuading President George W. Bush to scuttle a static counterinsurgency strategy and replace it with 30,000 reinforcements and a more activist, street-by-street counterterrorism tactic.

Today, even with that strategy producing a huge drop in daily attacks, Gen. Keane bluntly told The Washington Times that the United States again is losing.

“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”

We also learned that Obama’s decision to not even TRY to negotiate for U.S. troops to stay to safeguard what we had won was KNOWN to be a huge mistakeeven as Obama was MAKING that mistake:

(Reuters) – U.S. intelligence agencies warned that security gains in Iraq could degenerate into sectarian violence after a troop pullout that some officials say left the United States with little leverage in a country it occupied for nearly nine years.

A wave of bombings that killed at least 72 people in Baghdad on Thursday provided further evidence of a deteriorating security situation just days after the last U.S. troops left Iraq.

“This should be a surprise to no one that this is happening,” said House of Representatives intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers.

“Most people believed, the assessments that were coming out believed, that the sudden rapid withdrawal with no troop presence on the ground was going to leave this vacuum that would be filled with the kind of problems that you’re seeing,” Rogers, a Republican, said in an interview with Reuters.

Rogers said the troop pullout reduced U.S. influence and that a chaotic Iraq plays into Iran’s desire for increased influence in that region.

And now, under Obama’s completely failed and depraved leadership, the headline is, “Iraq Stands on the Brink of Disaster.” It is poised to fall under the influence of Iran because Obama was too much of a coward and a weakling to stick around like America did in Germany and Japan and Korea and a whole bunch of other places.

Even the New York Times writes about “a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.” It describes US State Department officials as being “confined to the embassy because of security concerns” after we pulled all of our troops out of the country. And the obvious result is that we are going to lose everything we fought so hard for and sacrificed so much for to win in Iraq.

And Barack Obama is criminally responsible for that complete disaster.

That leaves us with the dismal failure of Obama in Afghanistan.

Obama demanded a timetable for withdrawal so that our friends in Afghanistan would know they couldn’t count on us to stay and our enemies the Taliban would know that they could wait us out.

We find that Obama never bothered to listen to his generals in Afghanistan dating back to when they wanted 40,000 for their surge and he decided not to give them their request after humming and hawing FOREVER.

Lieutenant General John Allen told the Senate Armed Services Committee today that the Afghanistan decision President Obama announced last week was not among the range of options the military provided to the commander in chief. Allen’s testimony directly contradicts claims from senior Obama administration officials from a background briefing before the president’s announcement.

In response to questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Allen testified that Obama’s decision on the pace and size of Afghanistan withdrawals was “a more aggressive option than that which was presented.”

Graham pressed him. “My question is: Was that a option?”

Allen: “It was not.”

Allen’s claim, which came under oath, contradicts the line the White House had been providing reporters over the past week—that Obama simply chose one option among several presented by General David Petraeus. In a conference call last Wednesday, June 22, a reporter asked senior Obama administration officials about those options. “Did General Petraeus specifically endorse this plan, or was it one of the options that General Petraeus gave to the president?”

The U.S. military said in a secret report that the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are set to retake control of Afghanistan after NATO-led forces withdraw, raising the prospect of a major failure of Western policy after a costly war.

Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, confirmed the existence of the document, reported on Wednesday by Britian’s Times newspaper and the BBC.

Which is EXACTLY what conservatives predicted would happen if we followed Obama’s incredibly stupid and immoral policies.

When we elected Barack Obama, we elected a truly evil and vile man to lead us. Obama’s wicked reverend Jeremiah Wright spake as a prophet concerning the Obama presidency when he said, “No, no, no. Not God bless America! God DAMN America.” And this IS God damn America.

Barack Obama is a clear and present danger to America, to the American people and to the world. And if we don’t wise up and vote him out of office, we deserve every catastrophe that his presidency will create.

The Bible forewarned us that the beast is coming. And Obama was the useful idiot who has done so much to prepare the way for Antichrist.

The aircraft was large, modern and considered among the world’s safest. But that night it was flying straight into a huge thunderstorm. Turbulence was extreme, and airspeed indicators may not have been functioning properly. Worse, the pilots were incompetent. As the plane threatened to stall they panicked by pointing the nose up, losing speed when they ought to have done the opposite. It was all over in minutes.

Was this the fate of Flight 447, the Air France jet that plunged mysteriously into the Atlantic a couple of years ago? Could be. What I’m talking about here is the Obama presidency.

When it comes to piloting, Barack Obama seems to think he’s the political equivalent of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager and—in a “Fly Me to the Moon” sort of way—Nat King Cole rolled into one. “I think I’m a better speech writer than my speech writers,” he reportedly told an aide in 2008. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my political director.”

On another occasion—at the 2004 Democratic convention—Mr. Obama explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter that “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play at this level. I got game.”

Of course, it’s tempting to be immodest when your admirers are so immodest about you. How many times have we heard it said that Mr. Obama is the smartest president ever? Even when he’s criticized, his failures are usually chalked up to his supposed brilliance. Liberals say he’s too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are all part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

I don’t buy it. I just think the president isn’t very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery “makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs.” Today’s White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president’s rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama’s big speeches that didn’t amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a “Triple-A country.” Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are under Mr. Obama.

Then there is Mr. Obama as political tactician. He makes predictions that prove false. He makes promises he cannot honor. He raises expectations he cannot meet. He reneges on commitments made in private. He surrenders positions staked in public. He is absent from issues in which he has a duty to be involved. He is overbearing when he ought to be absent. At the height of the financial panic of 1907, Teddy Roosevelt, who had done much to bring the panic about by inveighing against big business, at least had the good sense to stick to his bear hunt and let J.P. Morgan sort things out. Not so this president, who puts a new twist on an old put-down: Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of financial capital.

Then there’s his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God’s good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn’t. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator.

Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful.

But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.

Oh, well. Never mind about that thing about him not being pretty much the world’s most self-exalted specimen in the history of the human race.

By some strange coincidence (or by some mystical alignment revealing the essence of Obama for the foolish fraud that he is), the same day the above article emerged the following Dilbert cartoon came out:

Note the stunning similarity in character: yes, the narcissist is a complete screw-up, but somehow he believes himself to be absolutely magnificent.

Have you ever encountered one of those punk kids who was just as certain that he was smarter than everybody else as he was that he was God’s gift to the entire universe? Usually these arrogant little vermin end up in prison because they just keep going farther and farther and getting away with crap until they finally take that one giant step too far. But occasionally they get elected president before the truth emerges about them.

When that happens, in the words of former chair of Obama’s council of economic advisers Christina Romer, we are all “pretty darned f—ked.” At least, that is, until somebody finally does something to control the irritating little turd.

It seems like it was just yesterday when we had an “imperialist warmonger” in the White House who was going to be replaced by a peace-loving Democrat who promised “hope” and “change” instead. It’s funny how that worked out, isn’t it? We still have troops in Iraq, we’ve escalated the war in Afghanistan, and now we’re bombing everything that moves in Libya. Yet, the same liberals who were protesting in the streets and calling George Bush a war criminal have mostly been meek and quiet about the fact that the President they supported has been following in George Bush’s footsteps.

So, the obvious question is, “Did you lefties believe ANY of the crap you were spewing about the war on terrorism before Obama got into office?” If so, maybe you could answer a few questions prompted by the things liberals were saying during the Bush years.

1) Isn’t this a rush to war? There were 17 UN resolutions regarding Iraq, Bush talked about going to war for a full year before we actually invaded, and he received Congressional approval first. After all that, liberals STILL shouted that it was a “rush to war.” Meanwhile, Obama decided to bomb Libya in between making his Final Four picks and planning out a vacation to Brazil, probably because Hillary yelled at him. How about applying the same standards to Obama that you applied to Bush?

2) Is Obama invading Libya because Gaddafi insulted him? Liberals claimed George Bush invaded Iraq because Saddam tried to assassinate his father. Using that same line of thinking, could the notoriously thin-skinned Obama be bombing Libya because he’s still angry that Gaddafi once said this about him?

We fear that Obama will feel that, because he is black with an inferiority complex, this will make him behave worse than the whites. This will be a tragedy. We tell him to be proud of himself as a black and feel that all Africa is behind him because if he sticks to this inferiority complex he will have a worse foreign policy than the whites had in the past.

Obama doesn’t have much use for anyone who criticizes him. Even his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright learned all about what the underside of a bus looks like after he dared to criticize Obama. Is that Obama’s real motivation? Hmmmmmmm, liberals?

3) Is this a war for oil? What was it liberals kept saying over and over about Iraq? Oh yeah, it was “No blood for oil!” What was the rationale for claiming the war in Iraq was about oil? Iraq had oil; we were going to war there; so obviously it just MUST be about oil. That was it. So, Libya has oil and unlike Hussein, Gaddafi has been cooperative of late; so there’s no compelling reason for America to invade….except perhaps, to safeguard all that Texas T. flowing beneath the sand. So, when do we have liberals in the streets shouting “No blood for oil?”

4) Where are the massive protests? Can’t you just see it? The Communist Party, Code Pink, the black bloc, and the free Mumia wackjobs all joining together with the Tea Party to protest Obama. Wouldn’t that be fun? I mean personally, I’ve been waiting for years to wear a “No Blood For Oil” sign while I carry around a giant puppet head. Someone call the commies and union members who organize all these hippie shindigs for the Left and let’s do this thing!

5) Shouldn’t we have tried to talk it out with Gaddafi instead? I thought that the Muslim world loves and respects America since Barack Obama became President? So, why not try to talk it out with Gaddafi? Perhaps Obama should have been humble, realized he didn’t have all the answers, and then he could have had a conversation with Gaddafi instead of threatening him? Maybe he should have considered the possibility that Libya’s culture is a little different than ours. Had he perhaps met with Gaddafi and bowed to him to show his respect, this could have probably been worked out without violence. Oh, why, why must we be so arrogant and so ignorant of other nations’ rich cultural traditions, which in Libya apparently consist of murdering everyone who opposes you?

6) Aren’t we just starting a cycle of violence by bombing Libya? You know what they say, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind!” We drop bombs on them, they get angry, and next thing you know, they turn into terrorists to get us back! That was what we heard from the Left over and over during the Bush years, wasn’t it? That we were creating terrorists?

That’s why liberals like Richard Gere suggested brilliant strategies like this to deal with Al-Qaeda:

In a situation like this, of course you identify with everyone who’s suffering. (But we must also think about) the terrorists who are creating such horrible future lives for themselves because of the negativity of this karma. It’s all of our jobs to keep our minds as expansive as possible. If you can see (the terrorists) as a relative who’s dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is love and compassion. There’s nothing better.

Maybe instead of bombing Libya, Obama needs to engage in a little more love and compassion by hugging Gaddafi into submission!

7) Isn’t Barack Obama a chickenhawk? Barack Obama has never served in the military; yet he just decided to engage in a “war of choice” in Libya. Even if you chalk up Iraq and Afghanistan to Obama cleaning up after Bush, this one is all on him. If American soliders die, it’s because Obama chose to put them in harm’s way. If Libyan civilians are killed by American weapons, it’s because Barack Obama gave the order to attack. So, can we all agree that Barack Obama is a squawking, yellow bellied chickenhawk?

I had a slightly different project last week in an article I titled, “Obama Adds Stupid And Hypocritical To Weak In His Libya No-Fly Policy.” In that, I added factoids, such as how Obama went from demonizing the war in Iraq to claiming credit for it; how Obama’s people claimed his wonderful Cairo speech was responsible for the desire for freedom, when really it was his terrible economic policies that have undermined economies throughout the world; how Obama attacked Bush for not having enough troops in Afghanistan and subsequently “air-raiding villages and killing civilians” to refusing to have any troops at all while we do nothing BUT air-raiding villages in Libya. That sort of thing.

“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” Obama responded.

[T]he President declared: “In the past there have been times when the United States acted unilaterally or did not have full international support, and as a consequence typically it was the United States military that ended up bearing the entire burden.”

On Saturday, President Obama while visiting Brazil launched a United Nations war without obtaining Congressional approval. We all must remember how the left crucified President George W. Bush over a nine-month debate concerning war with Iraq. This debate included multiple UN Resolutions and a Multi-National Force composed of dozens of nations. Many refer to this time of debate as a “rush to war.” Yesterday however, President Obama approved the launch of Tomahawk missiles effectively engaging us in a Libyan civil war. This decision came with no debate in Congress and one UN Resolution that was only voted on 48 hours before.

As the folks at Fox quickly pointed out, Bush actually had twice as many international allies for the invasion of Iraq as Obama has put together for his adventure in Libya. They even put together a list.

Then add to that insult the fact that Obama never bothered to get any kind of approval from Congress, whereas Bush had Congress’ approval for both Afghanistan AND Iraq. In Iraq, the war liberals always demonize him over, Congress granted Bush the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq” in October 2002.

Not only did Obama not have any such authority, but he literally started his unlateral war in Libya while he was on vacation in Brazil!!!

Dennis Kucinich is about the only Democrat who actually has the integrity to demand Obama answer for his impeachable offense which his fellow Democrats deceitfully and falsely tried to claim that Bush had committed.

Where are Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in demanding that chicken hawk war criminal Obama be impeached for abandoning the Constitution?

Iraq was – and damn, IT CONTINUES TO BE – depicted by the left as some kind of massive failure (except when it benefits them to falsely take credit for it). But Saddam Hussein’s head is hanging on Bush’s wall. And what about Muammar Gaddafi’s head?

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen has admitted that a stalemate could allow Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to remain in power despite facing intenational military action gainst his forces.He said that the outcome of military action from the air was “very uncertain” and made it clear that the US did not see the goal of Operation Odyssey Dawn as removing the Libyan leader from power, The Telegraph reports.

If Gaddafi stays in Libya, it will be a massive failure. And Gaddafi is going to stay in power.

If Colonel Qaddafi manages to remain in power, that will leave the United States and the United Nations-backed mission looking like a failure, foreign policy experts from all sides of the political spectrum said. “Barack Obama told Qaddafi to go; if Qaddafi doesn’t go, America will look diminished in the eyes of the world,” said Steven Clemons, senior fellow at the New American Foundation.

Stephen J. Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush and an architect of the 2003 Iraq invasion, said at a forum in San Francisco on Saturday that he feared the limited approach “could set us up for failure.”

“I don’t quite see what is behind the strategy in Libya,” Mr. Hadley said, speaking while a small clutch of protesters — mostly yelling chants about Iraq — were on the streets below. “We are now in a situation where we have a mismatch of what the president said we want to do as a nation, what the U.N. Security Council authorizes, and what we are actually ready to commit in resources.”

WASHINGTON – From tiny embryonic cells to the large-scale physics of global warming, President Barack Obama urged researchers on Monday to follow science and not ideology as he abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research. “Our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values,” Obama declared as he signed documents changing U.S. science policy and removing what some researchers have said were shackles on their work.

“It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,” Obama said.

Researchers said the new president’s message was clear: Science, which once propelled men to the moon, again matters in American life.

Despite the propaganda trumpeting the benefits that embryonic stem cells will bring to thousands of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and other crippling injuries and maladies, not one cure using human embryonic stem cells has been found during the more than 20 years scientists have been studying them.

On the other hand, hundreds of cures have already been effected using adult stem cells, and each week brings news of more cures or ameliorizations of injuries and diseases. Do No Harm: The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics publishes frequent studies showing the failure of embryonic stem cell research to offer any cures — despite the vast sums poured into such research and the claims made by “leading” researchers — and the successes of adult stem cell research and research using morally obtained pluripotential stem cells.

Supporters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, passed in 2004, held out hopes of imminent medical miracles that were being held up only by President Bush’s policy of not allowing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) beyond existing stem cell lines and which involved the destruction of embryos created for that purpose.

Five years later, ESCR has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state agency created to, as some have put it, restore science to its rightful place, is diverting funds from ESCR to research that has produced actual therapies and treatments: adult stem cell research. It not only has treated real people with real results; it also does not come with the moral baggage ESCR does.

Bottom line. It was Great Satan OBAMA who was following ideology and not science. Not Bush. Bush was right; it was OBAMA who was pursuing ideology and calling it “science.”

As for global warming, let me just say “Climategate.” In a fitting capstone of years of fraud, we have in the very words of climate “scientists” admissions of falsifying data, of deliberately concealing evidence and destroying data, of knowingly using “tricks” to manipulate data and produce deceptive results, and of engaging in a corrupt pattern of destroying scientific opponents by any means necessary.

Another example of Obama totally perverting science and academia has been his incredible deception over his stimulus package. Obama literally created an entire new “understanding” of economics by claiming that his stimulus had “created or saved” jobs. But:

Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw said, “there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University said “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?”

And the massive lies Obama told to impose his ObamaCare on the American people have simply been stunning.

But the case against Obama as a massive hypocrite, liar and fraud is more slam dunk than that. Obama has been caught clearly doing the very thing he so pompously demonized his predecessor for doing:

Govt’s handling of science on oil spill questionedThe oil spill that damaged the Gulf of Mexico’s reefs and wetlands is also threatening to stain the Obama administration’s reputation for relying on science to guide policy.
By DINA CAPPIELLO
Associated Press
Originally published Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 6:08 AM

WASHINGTON — The oil spill that damaged the Gulf of Mexico’s reefs and wetlands is also threatening to stain the Obama administration’s reputation for relying on science to guide policy.

Academics, environmentalists and federal investigators have accused the administration since the April spill of downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited.

[…]

The latest complaint from scientists comes in a report by the Interior Department’s inspector general, which concluded that the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the administration’s six-month ban on new deep-water drilling. The AP obtained the report early Wednesday.

The inspector general said the editing changes by the White House resulted “in the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed.” But it hadn’t been. Outside scientists were asked only to review new safety measures for offshore drilling.

“There are really only a few people that know what they are talking about” on offshore drilling,” said Ford Brett, managing director of Petroskills, a Tulsa, Okla.-based petroleum training organization. “The people who make this policy do not … so don’t misrepresent me and use me for cover,” said Brett, one of seven experts who reviewed the report.

[…]

Last month, staff for the presidential oil spill commission said that the White House’s budget office delayed publication of a scientific report that forecast how much oil could reach the Gulf’s shores. Federal scientists initially used a volume of oil that did not account for the administration’s various cleanup efforts, but the government ultimately cited smaller amounts of oil.

The same report said that President Barack Obama’s energy adviser, Carol Browner, mischaracterized on national TV a government analysis about where the oil went, saying it showed most of the oil was “gone.” The report said it could still be there. It also said that Browner and the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Jane Lubchenco, contributed to the public’s perception the report was more exact than it was by emphasizing peer review.

[…]

All seven experts asked to review the Interior Department’s work expressed concern about the change made by the White House, saying that it differed in important ways from the draft they had approved.

“We believe the report does not justify the moratorium as written, and that the moratorium as changed will not contribute measurably to increased safety and will have immediate and long-term economic effects,” the scientists wrote earlier this year to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Vitter. “The secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.”

Those complaints were similar to those of other scientists.

“Their estimates always seemed to be biased to the best case,” said Joseph Montoya, a biology professor at Georgia Tech. “A number of scientists have experienced a strong push back.”

The inspector general’s report said the administration did not violate federal rules because the executive summary did not say the experts approved of the moratorium and because the department publicly clarified what the experts said and had offered a formal apology.

If Barack Obama were to shoot someone dead on live television before an audience of hundreds of millions, there would be armies of “journalists” who would desperately try to change the story, change the facts, or somehow argue “Bush did it.”

Fortunately, a majority of the American people are finally coming to realize what a disgrace to the truth Barack Obama truly is.

Frankly, there aren’t enough words or superlatives in the English dictionary to describe the great Thomas Sowell. With an unparalleled gift to explain even the most complicated subjects in simple and easily understandable terms, few can match the pedigree and contributions of the Hoover Institute senior fellow. Author of the new book, “Dismantling America,” Sowell recently sat down for an interview with Investors Business Daily’s David Hogberg. And along with a few priceless jabs at Michelle Obama, sociology, Newsweek, and the public education system, Dr. Sowell discussed why he (like Niall Ferguson) believes America may be entering a prolonged period of decline.

“The only analogy I can think of from history is when the Norman conquerors of England published their laws in French for an English-speaking nation,” Sowell says about the Obama administration’s governing style, a style he characterizes as unconstitutional.

As someone who, if forced to, would label himself as more libertarian than conservative — though he has irked many with his support of American combat missions in Iraq — most noteworthy (and a bit shocking) about the interview is what Sowell believes the greatest threat is — terrorism, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the international scene. Questioned as to what some of the current markers of national decline are, it isn’t “huge bills that fundamentally change the way the economy operates,” reckless government spending, social engineering programs and the national debt which worry the economist the most, it is national security and President Obama’s foreign policy.

And Sowell makes a few not-so-subtle Neville Chamberlain analogies that are almost impossible to ignore:

Of course, the one that trumps them all is on the international scene. That’s where Iran is moving toward nuclear weapons. I’m just staggered at how little attention is being paid to that compared to frivolous things. If a nation with a record of sponsoring international terrorism gets nuclear weapons, that changes everything and it changes it forever.

Someday historians may wonder what were we thinking about when you look at the imbalance of power between the U.S. and Iran, and we sat there with folded hands and watched this happen, going through just enough motions at the United Nations to lull the public to sleep. That, I think, is the biggest threat.

Sowell also condemns the president for affronting our allies (in particular, the British and Israelis) in “clever” yet unmistakable ways the general public may not notice, further hastening America’s decline:

His first foreign policy gambit was to fly to Russia and offer to renege on the American commitment to put a missile shield in Eastern Europe…All he really got out of that was a demonstration of his amateurishness and of his willingness to sell out allies in hopes of winning over enemies. That ploy was tried in the 1930s and didn’t work all that well.

These are no ordinary times, with no ordinary president. Leading up to the historic “Hope and Change” election, commentators on the Right could not possibly have attacked Obama and his intentions to fundamentally change the identity and economy of America more than they already had. Even so, not only has President Obama fulfilled every single “fear-mongering” indictment down to a tee, he’s exceeded them — making even some his most extreme opponents look clairvoyant. So with keeping that in mind, and considering all the new challenges we face domestically, that one of the greatest economic minds of our time would still elevate national security and terrorism to such a level truly speaks volumes about the reality and situation of Iran.

Also citing the lack of expertise and national discussion in international issues, former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton confirmed to Greg Gutfeld that he was seriously considering a presidential run on Red Eye last week. Bolton-Sowell 2012? One can only dream. But hey, if a community organizer can get elected, why not someone with ten times the accomplishments and wisdom?

I’ve said many of the same things, myself. Just not as well, and not as succinctly. For example, I said:

If Iran gets its nukes, it will be able to do a number of things: 1) attack Israel, assuring Israel that if it uses its nukes against Iran, Iran will use its nukes against Israel; 2) shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which would immediately drive up the price of oil. The cost of gasoline in the U.S. would soar above $15 a gallon; 3) dramatically increase Iranian-sponsored terrorism worldwide.

If you don’t believe that a nuclear-armed Iran would pick a minimum of one of these options, you’re just nuts.

It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Iran is employing a lot of rocket scientists to create a ballistic nuclear missile capable of striking the United States and Israel. But when Democrats are in charge, even the most trivial aspects of common sense are akin to the most sophisticated form of theoretical mathematics.

“DES MOINES — Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.

While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of themsought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.”

But the fact that the failure to deal with Iran rests ENTIRELY in Democrats’ hands won’t stop them from blaming Bush when Iran rears its vicious head against the world. Any more than it stopped them from blaming Bush for the 2008 economic collapse in spite of the fact that they had had total control of Congress for the previous two years, and even though they had repeatedly prevented Bush from regulating and reforming GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which were at the epicenter of the disaster.

It’s just what cowards do. And the Democrat Party is the party of moral cowardice going back to at least the Carter years, if not dating back to the waning days of the LBJ administration.

You can go back and review the record. Nearly 60% of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate (29 out of 50) voted to authorize the Iraq War Resolution. Furthermore, virtually every single top Democrat was on the factual record agreeing with George Bush and supporting his reasoning to attack Saddam Hussein –

– and yet Democrats en masse cowardly, despicably, and I would argue treasonously, turned on Bush and turned on our troops in time of war. For no other reason than to treacherously obtain a cheap political advantage aided and abetted by a mainstream media propaganda apparatus that could have come right out of the vile brain of Joseph Goebbels.

In addition to their opposition to the Iraq War (which again 60% of Senate Democrats voted for, only to repudiate and claim Bush deceived them), Democrats opposed the Patriot Act; opposed Domestic Surveillance which allowed the US to track calls from international terrorists into the United States; opposed Gitmo, even though it is the clearly the ONLY reasonable place to hold incredibly dangerous terrorists that no country wants; opposed allowing terrorists to be tried in military tribunals to safeguard intelligence techniques and personnel, and to prevent the court system from being hijacked by enemies of freedom; opposed even the most reasonable use of profiling to weed out terrorists intent upon murdering Americans; and even declared surrender in the vile “I believe that … this war is lost” statement of Harry Reid, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader. I could go on. It boils down to the fact that the left despise anything that help us win the war on terror or protect us from terrorism.

"RUN AWAY!!!"

To the extent that Barack Obama has done anything – ANYTHING – right at all in the war on terror, it has only been because he repudiated himself and demonstrated that he was either an incompetent fool or a lying hypocrite. Obama – after publicly denouncing, undermining and alienating the CIA – has continued the policy of “torture” by continuing the policy of “rendition” in which terror suspects are sent to other countries that use torture. Obama – after continually denouncing Bush over Gitmo – has STILL not closed the facility down two full years after usurping the office of the presidency with lies. Obama is using a surge strategy in Afghanistan after denouncing Bush’s successful surge strategy in Iraq and blatantly predicting it would fail. And Obama is now continuing the Bush policy of using predator drones to attack terrorist positions inside Pakistan that US Special Operations forces cannot reach.

Iran WILL get the nuclear bomb. Democrats guaranteed that Iran would be able to do so.

Iran will become a plague upon global peace and security unlike anything the world has ever seen at least since the rise of the Nazis and the abject failure of FDR and Neville Chamberlain to deal with the clear and present danger.

And when that day comes, America will be unable to meaningfully deal with it because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party made us economically incapable of rising to any significant occasion.

One could conclude – based on rhetoric alone – that George Bush never left office, and Obama never actually ascended to the presidency.

After all, according to the Obama narrative, only one man is responsible for anything these days. And that man is George Bush.

Obama isn’t “responsible.” He’s completely irresponsible.

Obama has never once taken the “The Buck Stops With George Bush” sign off of his desk.

Since we all know that the buck stops at the highest political office, and since we all know that Obama keeps passing the buck off to George Bush, we can therefore know that Obama really isn’t our president. Whether he produces his damn birth certificate or not. Given the fact that leadership is ultimately about taking responsibility, and Obama refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever, he’s clearly not the POTUS. And since Bush is apparently STILL responsible for everything, he becomes our defacto president even nearly two years after actually leaving the office.

Well, Barry Hussein may never accept responsibility for the failure of his policies, but at least more Americans are finally saying that this is Barack Obama’s sucky economy, rather than agreeing with Obama that he had nothing to do with anything.

For the first time since President Obama took office, voters see his policies as equally to blame with those of President George W. Bush for the country’s current economic problems.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters now think Obama’s policies are to blame for the continuing bad economy, up three points from last month. Forty-seven percent (47%) say the recession that began under Bush is at fault.

With voters across the country expressing stronger belief that the economy is getting worse rather than better, these new findings spell potential bad news for Democratic candidates this fall. The president is already planning to limit his campaign appearances with candidates because of potential voter backlash.

In June and last October, 45% blamed Obama’s policies for the country’s ongoing economic woes, the previous high finding on this question. The number who blame Bush is down from 62% in May 2009 when Rasmussen Reports first began tracking the question regularly. Only 27% faulted Obama at that time.

As is often the case, Mainstream voters and the Political Class have wholly different viewpoints on this question. While 61% of Mainstream voters now blame Obama’s policies, 87% of the Political Class say the bad economy is due to the recession that began under Bush.

Fifty-five percent (55%) of men blame Obama’s policies for the current economic problems, while 52% of women think Bush is the cause.

Among voters not affiliated with either major party, Obama is now chiefly to blame by a 52% to 44% margin.

That last paragraph is particularly significant. Independents OVERWHELMINGLY blame Obama over Bush for the worsening economy.

I don’t really care what Democrats think about Obama vs. Bush. The Democrat Party can be rightly defined as the party of moral idiocy. But we are finally seeing rank-and-file Americans who are not involved with political ideology looking at going on two years of failure and false demagoguery and coming to the correct conclusion about whom to hold responsible.

When the economy appeared to be improving, Obama starting talking about his “summer of economic recovery.”

Vice President Joe Biden today will kick off the Obama administration’s “Recovery Summer,” a six-week-long push designed to highlight the jobs accompanying a surge in stimulus-funded projects to improve highways, parks, drinking water and other public works.

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said: “This summer will be the most active Recovery Act season yet, with thousands of highly-visible road, bridge, water and other infrastructure projects breaking ground across the country, giving the American people a first-hand look at the Recovery Act in their own backyards and making it crystal clear what the cost would have been of doing nothing.”

Reporting from Washington — U.S. economic growth slowed sharply in the spring, stoking concerns about a weak job market, a drawn-out struggle for the unemployed and growing financial pressures on millions of American families.

The nation’s gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 2.4% in the second quarter, falling from an upwardly revised 3.7% expansion in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Friday.

While many economists had expected growth to moderate, the reported decline was a jolting 35% below the previous quarter. Gross domestic product is the value of all goods and services produced in the economy. […]

In the wake of Friday’s report, a number of economists downgraded their growth forecast for the second half of the year to as low as 1.5%, an anemic rate that would likely push the unemployment rate above June’s 9.5% figure.

Commerce officials also revised downward some prior growth figures for real GDP, which is the inflation-adjusted value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. The government Friday said real GDP grew 5% in the fourth quarter of 2009, down from a previously reported 5.6%.

Overall, the new data painted a picture of a deeper recession than previously believed.

Government spending and inventory adjustments have powered the economic recovery that began last summer, and they juiced up the second quarter as well. But economists expect tighter public spending, particularly by budget-strapped state and local governments, to be a drag on the economy in the coming quarters.
Many private economists projected that the unemployment rate would rise to 9.8% or higher by the end of the year.

And today, we learned that housing prices were down, factory orders were down, and consumer spending was down. As the LA Times put it:

U.S. consumers did not boost their spending in June and their incomes failed to increase, further evidence that the economic recovery slowed in the spring. And Americans saved at the highest rate in nearly a year.

Personal spending was unchanged in June, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. It was the third straight month of lackluster consumer demand. Incomes were also flat, the weakest showing in nine months.

The disappointing report on spending and income was among a raft of data released Tuesday that confirmed the economy ended the April-to-June quarter on a weak note.

Factory orders dropped 1.2 percent in June to a seasonally adjusted $406.4 billion, the Commerce Department said. It was the second consecutive decline after nine straight months of gains. Lower demand for steel, construction machinery and aircraft dragged down the figure.

And the number of buyers who signed contracts to purchase homes fell in June. The National Association of Realtors says its seasonally adjusted index of sales agreements for previously occupied homes dipped 2.6 percent to a reading of 75.7. That was the lowest on records dating back to 2001 and down nearly 19 percent from the same month a year earlier.

Last week the government said economic growth for the second quarter slowed to 2.4 percent. Many analysts believe it will dip further in the second half of the year as high unemployment, shaky consumer confidence and renewed troubles in housing weigh on the year-old economic recovery.

President Obama was in New Jersey yesterday killing time before his appearance on ‘The View’. So he stopped at Tastee Subs and held a small business summit, pushing for legislation to increase funding to the Small Business Administration. In between sound bytes on jobs and bites of Tastee’s super-sub special, more bad economic news came rolling Obama’s way.

And then all of a sudden the Obama administration is all, “Oh, crap! Stop looking at our “success”! No! Don’t look at our “recovery summer”! We don’t want to take responsibility after all! Start looking at Bush again! He’s the only one who is actually RESPONSIBLE!”

So now – after Obama patted himself on the back and congratulated himself for his mission accomplished, all of a sudden we’re back to the “Bush recession.”

BIDEN LAMENTS ‘BUSH RECESSION’…. Vice President Biden appeared on NBC’s “Today” show earlier, and used a line I don’t recall leading White House officials using before, at least not lately.

Ann Curry noted that the administration has been blamed for high unemployment rates, and asked, “Has this administration done enough?”

Biden replied, “Let me put it this way: there’s never enough until we restore the 8 million jobs lost in the Bush Recession. Until that happens, it doesn’t matter. I mean, it matters, but it’s not enough.”

Which is to say that, according to the Obama administration, George Bush is to blame for all the jobs HE lost, PLUS all the jobs that OBAMA lost. After going on two years in office, Obama still isn’t responsible for anything at all. Oh, except for that brief period when it looked like maybe things were looking up and Obama could suddenly be “responsible”.

When Bush left office, unemployment was 7.6%. Barry Hussein promised that his massive stimulus would save the day. He assured the American people that he understood what was wrong, and that he had the solution. His administration promised that if the stimulus (which started out at $787 billion, then got revised upward to $862 billion, but which will actually cost taxpayers $3.27 TRILLION) was passed, unemployment would not go over 8%.

President Obama is being forced to wade into a domestic economic debate that just won’t go away: As the unemployment rate rises, there have been calls for a second round of stimulus spending.

Obama is in a difficult position. He has to defend his $787 billion economic stimulus package at a time when there are few visible signs that it has had an effect. Unemployment is at 9.5 percent, even though the White House predicted in January that with the stimulus bill, it would rise to only about 8 percent.

And the LA Times article cites economists as now predicting that unemployment will rise to at least 9.8% – or higher. Which for the record is a lot higher than 8%.

It’s not enough to say Obama was incompetent. He lied. He pitched himself as Mr. Wonderful, and utterly failed to live up to all of his false promises.

In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.

And I had cause to cite that article again recently, as Obama pursued the incredibly demagogic rhetoric that said we had to go forward with his “change” rather than backward. Lest you don’t see the obvious flaw, allow me to point out that Germany went forward with Hitler’s “change,” too. And then there was Stalin’s “change,” and Pol Pot’s “change,” and Castro’s “change,” etc.

To argue that moving forward to “change” is somehow intrinsically good is intrinsically stupid. It is the very worst kind of moral idiocy. And that “logic” has repeatedly justified the most evil outcomes in the history of the human race.

It was the late 1980s, and I experienced something that will probably puzzle me for the rest of my life on this earth.

I had ordered “Blazer Cable” so that I could see the Portland Trailblazer home games. And in order to help pay for it – and to make it more fun to watch – I got a few friends to go in on it with me.

One night, one of my friends brought one of his friends over on a night when the Blazers were playing the Chicago Bulls. I thought the guy had some faulty wiring from about the moment I met him, but, what they hey.

In any event, to get to the point, at some point during the game my friend’s friend was sitting on the couch alone with me (everybody else was either in the kitchen or in the bathroom, as it was halftime). They were interviewing Michael Jordan. And he looked over at me and said, “Would you trade places with Michael Jordan?”

This was like the stupidest questions I had ever heard, and I’ve heard quite a few stupid questions.

“Of course I would,” I said. I mean, duh. Michael Jordan was strikingly handsome, he was filthy rich, he was incredibly successful, and he was one of the best athletes in the history of the human race. And I wouldn’t want to trade places with him why, exactly?

Well, yeah. I waited to hear the cross-eyed albino boy start playing a banjo.

At the time, I was too astonished to be angry at the guy. It was like encountering someone who – in spite of massive evidence to the contrary – believed he was invisible to the human eye.

I’ve thought about that few second encounter a number of times since. It still amazes me to this very day. How can somebody possibly get that stupid?

In the years before that moment, and since then, I had known some black men who were total turds. And I have known some black men whom I regarded as having superior character to my own.

Lumping people into racial groups and then judging people on the basis of the color of their skin is every bit as stupid as not wanting to change places with Michael Jordan simply “because he’s black.” But I see it being done all the time these days. By the left.

I was raised to regard character, intelligence, virtue, attitude and attractiveness of personality as the qualities that determined the value of a person. It had never even occurred to me to think that the color of one’s skin made on more or less valuable.

I was also raised to want to continue to improve myself. I was raised to want to become a better human being, to improve my station in, and my quality of, life.

I think that’s why I react so viscerally to the racial attitude inherent in modern liberalism. To pit people against each other on the basis of color and bigotry, and to label white people as being evil and somehow complicit in some kind of white power structure is bad enough. But it goes beyond that.

It’s self-taught, self-limiting perpetual victimhood. It’s providing a class of people with a ready-made excuse for failure; it’s discouraging them from even really bothering to try, and rewarding them for not trying; it’s an evil exchange in which one accepts all kinds of control over their lives in exchange for destructive and cancerous welfare; it’s wallowing in an attitude of bitterness and even self-loathing that dooms one to a life of misery. It is a guaranteed perpetuation of failure.

It is a completely alien worldview to me. Every bit as much as that idiot who wouldn’t trade places with Michael Jordan “because he’s black.”

I made the earlier comment that I’ve met black men whom I regarded as being superior to me in the thing that I value most – character. They were examples to me, and as a result of their friendship, I became a better person. I’ve also known a number of white men whose superior character helped me advance in my own life. The point is that you desire excellence, and you take it wherever you can find it.

I have a feeling that Pastor C.L. Bryant would be one of those men, were I fortunate enough to know him.

Comedian Eddie Murphy once joked that Lincoln forgot to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and that people should go out and claim their slaves. I’m here to tell you that the Democratic Party took that request seriously and have claimed their slaves.
When 98 percent of African-Americans vote Democrat, that tells me that they are psychological and economic slaves to a Party that structures its fiscal policy to keep the black man down.

Welfare policy, government-forced affirmative action, reduced testing requirements for minorities…these are all things that don’t serve to elevate people to greatness, rather, they keep people down.

This video is a movie trailer about a man who proposes that these slaves to the liberals run away from the slave plantation that liberals have created. Its creator, Pastor C.L. Bryant, holds an honest discussion about black conservatives in America. Quote the man, “Run away from the slavery of tyranny toward the blessings of liberty!” Check it out:

David Horowitz rightly calls African-Americans “the human shields of the Democrat Party.” It simply a fact of history that modern African-Americans have come hat-in-hand to the Party of Slavery, and the Party of the Ku Klux Klan.

“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life” (Foner 1989, p. 425–426).

Let us never forget that Democrats were the party of slavery. And that Democrats were the creators of the Ku Klux Klan. It literally took a war in which Democrats had to be militarily crushed to keep them from enslaving people based on the color of their skin. And thank God for the Republican Party and a Republican president for freeing the slaves from Democrats. Let’s not forget that Woodrow Wilson – Democrat president and the father of the progressive movement – RE-segregated the military after Republicans had DE-segregated it. Let us not forget that Wilson cheered the racist propaganda film “Birth of a Nation.” Let us never forget that the national party convention that was so directly tied to the Ku Klux Klan that it was called the “Klanbake” was the 1924 DEMOCRAT convention. Let’s not forget that FDR’s New Deal directly attacked blacks and kept them from getting jobs.

As we move into the 1950s we find that a Democrat Governor, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard in 1957 to prevent black children being integrated into white schools. And again, a Republican president had to rise to the occasion, with Dwight D. Eisenhower sending in US Army airborne troops to enforce racial equality that had once again been opposed by Democrats. And of course Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace would fight for racist segregation all over again in 1963. It was Democrat John F. Kennedy who sent in the troops this time. But few are aware that that same John Kennedy had previously voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act.

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”77 On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So now conservatives are suddenly racists for agreeing with Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. and against liberals and the vile pseudo values that the greatest civil rights leaders in history condemned?

Richard Nixon, whom Democrats love to make the poster boy for “Republican racism,” was in fact the first president to introduce the racial quotas that Democrats have been trying to implement and expand ever since. Which is to say that, if you want to argue that Nixon was a racist, Democrats have been baptizing themselves in Nixon’s racism ever since. And if Nixon employed a racially immoral strategy to win whites, the Democrat Party has employed the flip-side of that same immoral strategy to win blacks.

Liberals are biblical – and never in a good way:

PSA 52:3 You love evil more than good, Falsehood more than speaking what is right.
MIC 3:2 “You who hate good and love evil, Who tear off their skin from them And their flesh from their bones

There are men and women of basic virtue in every race, and even every creed. The problem is that there are fewer and fewer of these, while the men and women of apathy, degeneration and self-centeredness abound.

Slavery is a terrible thing. But it is even worse when one willingly applies the shackles to his or her own wrists and ankles and demands the right to a government-imposed easy way out, in pathetic contrast to the principle from an Aesop fable, “Better to starve free than be a fat slave.”

For the record, I promised that Obama would be a total failure. I also promised that the media – which is so completely in the tank for Obama that we have to go back to Tass and the USSR to find a parallel – would give Obama a pass on his failure.

Every night, they crawl into a cramped tent barely big enough to hold a mattress and their few belongings.

For six months, they have lived on the street in a once-thriving middle-class neighborhood. Every day, they hustle for basic necessities. Their bathroom is in the home of a neighbor whose house is still standing, their evening light comes from Leo’s cellphone and their meals from other families who live in nearby tents.

Leo, 33, a computer technician, wonders how much longer they have to live this way or where else they can go.

His wife of 12 years and older daughter died in the earthquake. His house, like most buildings that collapsed, remains a heap of concrete and debris.

“Since January 12th, I’ve never received any aid,” Leo says in French. “Ever since this dramatic event, it’s like life has no meaning anymore. Nothing has changed in six months.”

Six months to the day since a magnitude-7.0 earthquake leveled 60% of the city’s buildings and killed 230,000 people, there are few visible signs of improvement.
Buildings destroyed by the earthquake lie where they collapsed. The presidential palace, which became a worldwide symbol of the devastation, remains a gleaming heap of concrete.

One of the biggest challenges is helping the estimated 1.5 million people who were left homeless. More than 1,300 makeshift camps sprang up after the earthquake. Food and housing are scarce and expensive, even for the few, like Leo, still working.

“It’s an emergency response still,” says Mary Kate MacIsaac, a spokeswoman in Haiti for the Christian relief group World Vision. “We are still meeting the basic needs of people in these camps … but it’s not sustainable. We need to transition into the recovery or the long-term goal.”

Frustration is high among Haitians and aid groups who say they see halting and haphazard progress toward recovery.

And all of those 1300 camps should be given names relating to Obama as Failure-in-Chief. Camp Hopey. Camp Changey. Camp Hussein. Camp Gitmo. And so on.

Barack Obama is an empty suit. The only things he can do is attend a racist, Marxist, anti-American church for twenty years and read off a teleprompter screen. Other than that, he is a completely useless fool.

Obama was a failure in Haiti from the very start.

Allow me to reproduce much of my January article in order to once again expose Barack Obama and the mainstream media:

Yesterday on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos substitute host Jake Tapper interviewed Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Bush could not have been more gracious in praising Obama’s relief efforts.

In other words, he didn’t try to do to Obama what Obama and the Democrats so viciously did to him.

And I couldn’t help but wonder: if Democrats believed their own crap about Bush and Katrina, why on earth would they be asking George Bush to lead an effort for Haitian relief now?

It has now been six days since the earthquake that destroyed Haiti. Obama promised an unprecedented massive effort to provide emergency relief.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. relief effort after the Haiti earthquake started too slowly and cautiously, says a retired general who led the military relief effort on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“The next morning after the earthquake, as a military man of 37 years service, I assumed … there would be airplanes delivering aid, not troops, but aid,” said retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who coordinated military operations after disaster struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. “What we saw instead was discussion about, ‘Well we’ve got to send an assessment team in to see what the needs are.’ And anytime I hear that, my head turns red.”

The problem, Honore told USA TODAY, is that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, instead of the military, take the lead in international disaster response.

“I was a little frustrated to hear that USAID was the lead agency,” he said. “I respect them, but they’re not a rapid deployment unit.”

USAID immediately dispatched an assessment team and search-and-rescue teams, but there has still not been widespread distribution of food or water, three days after the Haiti earthquake.

Let’s file that as a ‘no’.

Very little in the way of actual lifesaving supplies had gone out as of the time of that article. Has that situation improved?

So how about it, Martha? Is the relief effort getting to those who need it most?

RADDATZ: Well, we actually went with a convoy, one truckload of supplies yesterday. We arrived really early in the morning, expecting to track this truck, come back, and go out with another truck. It took us five-and-a-half hours to get these supplies where they were needed.

How many days did Bush get before Democrats hatefully and viciously attacked him?

Well, are they at least providing security for the relief supplies yet to come?

Another exchange during the ABC program between Jake Tapper and Martha Raddatz:

TAPPER: Speaking of chaos, Martha, we keep hearing about reports of sporadic violence. Where is the U.S. military in all this? Are they making attempts to secure the island?

RADDATZ: Absolutely not, Jake. They really aren’t. I keep hearing these numbers. There are about 4,200 American military supporting this mission, but mostly they’re out on the ships. They’re on the cutters. You’ve got the 82nd Airborne, not all of the 82nd Airborne, a brigade, about 3,500 soldiers are here. They’re expected to be here sometime next week. The Marines are not yet here, 2,200 Marines.

Jake Tapper pointed out to the US military commander for the region, General Keen, that:

General Keen, I’d like to go to you first. Martha Raddatz just reported that U.S. troops are not out there securing Haiti, even though there are sporadic outbursts of violence, some of them horrific. We heard a report of — in Petionville, a suburb of Port- au-Prince, a policeman handed over a suspected looter to an angry crowd. They stripped him, beat him, and set him on fire. We’ve also heard that some medical personnel are clearing the area because they don’t feel secure.

Sounds like another rather big ‘no’ vote.

I think I’ve amply proven the case that a week after the Haiti disaster a great deal separates what has been done from what could have been done. I can’t help but remember how bitterly the left attacked Bush for the same failures following an unprecedented natural disaster.

The left ignored the fact that Hurricane Katrina was a supermassive disaster that simply overwhelmed the resources of the federal government regardless of who was in charge of it. They ignored the fact that Bill Clinton hadn’t prepared New Orleans for such a disaster any better than George Bush did. They ignored the fact that the heavily Democratic city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana had utterly failed to prepare, when such preparation should have been at the very core of their agenda. They ignored details such as this:

The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts, first that the president didn’t do what the incompetent mayor of New Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and didn’t, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a “mandatory” evacuation a day late, but kept the city’s 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty water.

They ignored everything but their ideological agenda and the political axe-to-grind they had in their hands to swing at George Bush with.

And the propagandistic mainstream media helped them do it.

The same media that basically demanded that George Bush push a button and FIX New Orleans have gone out of their way to make excuses for the numerous failures in Haiti under Obama.

Obama made all sorts of grandiose promises to help devastated Haiti. But it is an obvious, glaring FACT that he never bothered to even try to live up to them. As in so many other occasions, Obama took advantage of the media spotlight to garner attention for himself, and then walked away.

And a media that is more like the party-propaganda machine controlled by Joseph Goebbels than it is the independent watchdog envisioned by the founding fathers has let him do it.

And all the while these events are swirling around, Barack Obama is allowing unknown numbers of poor, oppressed, helpless black people in Haiti to suffer and die.

It’s long passed time that Barack Obama be held accountable for his failures and his false promises involving Haiti. And it’s also long passed time that the American people hold responsible the mainstream media that has become nothing but a propagandist tool.

There seems to be a genius to Obama’s incompetence. He is failing on so many levels, in so many ways, all at the same time, that nobody can possibly keep track of them all.

Which means, paradoxically, that the more failures Obama accumulates, the better he looks, as coverage of all the failure is dissipated such that nothing receives the focus it needs to penetrate the American culture of distraction.

Obama is turning to Bush’s general and Bush’s Secretary of Defense in order to overcome the failure created by utterly failed Democrat Party ideas.

Chief among those utterly failed Democrat ideas is the timetable for cut-and-run. Democrats wanted to impose this guaranteed-to-fail strategy for Iraq, but Bush prevailed and won the war. Now they want to make sure we lose in Afghanistan, as Afghans who want to stay alive realize who will still be there a year from now (i.e., the Taliban), and who won’t (i.e., the United States), and that they’d better not ally themselves with their “timetable for withdrawal” all-too-temporary American allies.

Of course, the failure in Afghanistan comes as a welcome relief to day 72 of the even bigger failure in the Gulf of Mexico.

The leftwing media is essentially shouting, “Hey, take your eye off that total failure over there on the Gulf Coast. Look over here!!! Obama fired a guy that pricked his thin-skin and appointed Bush’s general to save his liberal ass. And he gave a speech!!! Don’t waste your time thinking about the fact that BP took the cap off the leaking hole so that 104,000 gallons of oil per hour could pour out of the sea floor. Don’t look at the possibility that as much as 4.2 million gallons of oil are pouring out of that damn hole Obama can’t plug every single day!!!

Where are we supposed to look to see an area in which Obama HASN’T failed?

Look at everything, if you have time to contemplate all the failure that Obama has brought. But don’t be distracted from taking time to watch the spill cam footage every day, or following the latest tracking of Obama’s oil spill and its contamination of the Gulf Coast, or following the Obama-regime-caused inability to clean up the mess.

As you watch the daily disaster unfolding, don’t forget to remember that Obama is the guy running the show. Or that the show looks like a chicken running around after its head has been cut off

If you see Obama covered in oil, it’s because a gang of liberals shoved him overboard into the sticky muck.

It appears that things are really getting desperate for the left. Leftwing journalists, who have always been such reliable propagandists for Democrats, might finally be at that point where they realize if they don’t report the truth, their viewers will go to those that will.

From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

“The present system is not working,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano’s story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

They were supposed to be better prepared. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989, skimmers, booms and dispersants were in short supply for the response, which was led by a consortium of oil companies in which BP was the majority stakeholder.

A year later, lawmakers passed the federal Oil Pollution Act to ensure that plans were in place for oil spills, so the response effort would be quick, with clear responsibilities for everyone involved.

No skimmers were available when the Exxon Valdes ran aground. And – thanks to our fool-in-chief Barry Hussein – when we had a chance to get some much needed assistance to supply much-needed skimmers, Barry apparently thought they said, “We’d like to send you winners” and turned them down fearing they would make him look bad.

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

Had Obama accepted the offer back then and not allowed BP to use illegal dispersants, the oil would have never made landfall 48 miles away.

Today, (a month and half to late) there are US tankers that are steaming to the site with four pairs of modern skimming booms that were airlifted from the Netherlands and should be sucking up oil at the flow site within days.

Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.

If those skimmers were in place when they were offered a month ago, each pair could presumably recover 4.4 million barrels of oil. Four pairs of the state of the art skimmers would be able to suck up 17.6 million barrels in a month, although they will not be able to reach the depths of the plumes that are floating away with the illegal dispersants.

Thirteen nations offered to give us help to mitigate this massive disaster. And Obama basically wrote, “To whom it may concern, please to get the hell out of my business” letters to all of them.

Tar blobs began washing up on Florida’s white sand beaches near Pensacola this past weekend. Crude oil has already been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi, and has impacted about 125 miles of Louisiana coastline.

It didn’t have to be this way.
(Reuters)There are miles of floating oil containment boom in warehouse right now and the manufacturer Packgen says it can make lots more on short notice.There’s just one problem… No one will come get it.

Our new Louisiana poll has a lot of data points to show how unhappy voters in the state are with Barack Obama’s handling of the oil spill but one perhaps sums it up better than anything else- a majority of voters there think George W. Bush did a better job with Katrina than Obama’s done dealing with the spill.

50% of voters in the state, even including 31% of Democrats, give Bush higher marks on that question compared to 35% who pick Obama.

Since Obama was elected, I’ve been saying that a third of American voters would continue to support Obama even if he led us into the stone-age-like conditions that Kim Il Jong has led his people into. We could be living in the dark and freezing at night, and scratching our own fecal matter from the ground in order to have something to burn, and this group of people would still adore their Dear Leader.

And what is Obama’s response to this terrible crisis? Well, his golf game certainly hasn’t suffered in any way. He’s been very busy doing fundraisers so his fellow liberal buddies can have a chance to stay in office. He got a nice vacation in.

Oh, and he gave a speech. A speech in which Obama sought to seize advantage of the disaster in order to impose his monstrous and disastrous cap-and-trade system that would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.” Obama is no leader who can possibly solve this crisis; he is rather a demagogic community organizer who can only seek to ideologically benefit from the crisis.

And MSNBC and the New York Times aren’t the only liberals who realize the disastrous and disgraceful failure that Obama has been. Longtime liberal Democrat political strategist James Carville realized it. Liberal journalist and former Clinton administration public affairs hack Kirsten Powers realized it. I’m sure a lot of other liberal media pukes are realizing that we’re coming to the place where they either throw Obama overboard for his incompetence, or demonstrate that they themselves are clearly incompetent in their analysis.

The utter lack of leadership and hands-on management in responding to the Gulf oil crisis is an embarrassment to the President, as well as a hideous disaster for the Gulf and those who live near it. Can Obama’s first-ever Oval Office address make the damage to his standing go away? I seriously doubt it. Obama has failed in his duty to protect the homeland through sheer inexperience, incompetence, and indolence. The man who has planty of time for golf, hoops, parties, and fund-raisers is asleep at the switch when it comes to making the system respond effectively to an emergency. There is no papering over the spectacle with rhetoric.